Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself® XML

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

I basically agree with the other reviews, and would like to add that there are many technical inaccuracies in this book. In the first chapter alone (didn't browse past the 1st chapter)there are many items, such as code examples, that are just wrong. Incorrect syntax, missing brackets, and more serious errors such as presenting blatantly non well-formed XML as well formed XML. Also, the very first example of XML in the book has an internal DTD specification with no explanation of this.

I did not buy this book, but saw it in the bookstore. I am a technical reviewer of computer books, and was taking a look at the existing beginning level books on XML as part of some research. There is not much out there. Out the books I looked at for beginners, XML Bible looked good. I would skip past this one, and look elsewhere.

I bet there is some good material in this book, but I feel the convoluted format, presentation, and ordering would only serve to confuse the beginning XML reader.

Please note that I do not own the book and these comments are based on a review of the 1st chapter only.

I bought this book to learn about XML. I'm a professional programmer who has read literally hundreds of programming books. This book is alone in that it is the only programming book I have ever literally thrown out, and that after reading the entire book.

Here's why:

1) The examples are obviously wrong. If the authors can't write 5 lines of correct code, they either haven't proofread their work or they don't know the subject.

2) The examples do not relate to the subject matter at hand. To cite one case, the text describes nesting elements, and the examples are all simple cases of mis-nested elements, with none of correctly nested ones. Another case an entire chapter talks about encoding XML lists but gives only HTML 4.0 examples; not an XML example in the entire chapter.

3) The text displays a dreadful lack of understanding of the material. To teach something you have to understand it. This text can't teach because the authors don't have even a rudamentary understanding of the material. If they did, the text would be clearer and correct, there would be some structure to the writing, and the examples would at least be close to correct.

Buy another XML book. You'll have to buy one anyway if you buy this book.

I have been reviewing many book related to XML and SGML and seen many confusing and technical, hard to understand books. But this book is so confusing. Difficult to understand even the very beginning chapters of the book. The layout is not clear and the information they are providing is far away from the spot.

I would recommend you to look some other alternatives of this book in the market.

I would not recommend this book to a beginner. The author's style and content is extremely convoluted. The book starts out full-speed with very detailed technical specifications of XML and hardly any explanation of the fundamentals of this new and exciting language.

Not surprisingly, the reader is lost after studying just a few chapters because the succinct specifications are extremely hard to follow and the examples are not illustrative of the point that the authors are trying to make.

In conclusion, the authors completely miss the mark by failing to provide a clear and easy to comprehend format for beginners of XML. Maybe, this book is helpful to those who already have a fair amount of understanding of XML.

When I bought this book, I really hoped I could learn something quickly. However, after trying to read the first several chapters. I was frustrated and I have to say: I made a wrong decision. Today I bought "XML Bible", just after chapter 3, 4 and 5 within 2 hours, I could tell the diffrence between two-star and five-star.

This book is pure garbage. All of the fancy formatting, shaded boxes and indexed figures cannot hide the Content which is a dreadfully thought out mix of unnecessarily technical specs with inane, pointless waffle.

The book promises (gaurantees) to give you quick answers but after 4 hours of browsing, I had learned nothing I hadn't learned from 10 minutes of online tutorials, if anything I was more confused than when I opened the book.

I am a professional developer and have read many technical books, this is one of the worst I have read.

I bought the book and (since I started highlighting it) I have promptly called IDG Books for a FULL REFUND.

The examples are full of errors. Most can not be entered as they are published, since they are missing elements ('root elements' in most of them). It looks like the authors copied the W3C's recommendation on half the pages and tried to write some code and words for the other pages.

The book never even tells the reader to use a text editor to "program" XML/XSL. It is left up to the reader to figure out how this XML works.

Like most of the other reviewers, this is the worst programming book I have ever seen. I bought it in a hurry; fortunately I was in India at the time, where books are cheap, and only lost 70 cents or so. I'm actually impressed that anyone has lasted long enough with this book to even *find* the errors and typos; for myself, the organization is so thoroughly awful that I realized within half an hour that this was junk.

Here's what's wrong with the organization: the correct way to teach a concept is to first show a simple implementation of it, then show a more complex implementation of it, et cetera. That's not what this book does. This book starts at the *beginning* of a very complex XML document, and torturously works its way towards the end. So, for example, DTDs are on page 26. EBFN notation is on page 38. JUST MAKING A &*@#ing LINK is on page 276. By the time you reach the end at page 442, you *may* in fact know how to create an XML document -- were it not for all the errors, and the fact that you will have chewed your own face off first.

I was going to sell this book for $.50 on Ebay, but after reading everybody else's experiences, I've decided that it would be unethical to inflict this upon another person. So, it's off to the recycling bin!

I'm about three-quarters of the way through this book--reading page by page, not like the Harlequin romances that I usually skim for juicy bits--and am so glad I didn't actually have to pay for my copy.

Seventeen pages into _TYXML_, I started feeling compelled to mark the errors so that they wouldn't distract me from the content; the side of my book is now bristling with Post-it notes. Errors include but are not limited to misspelled, misused, omitted, and repeated words; incorrect and incorrectly labeled examples; and bad HTML, XML, and good old English syntax. Amazingly, the book's credits include the names of _four_ copyeditors--presumably so that other publishing houses can avoid them.

Unfortunately, the layout is just as bad. Each page spread is supposed to represent a "task" and contains a fixed set of components: body text, Take Note, Cross-Reference, and Find it Online on the left side, with examples on the right. Not all "tasks" are appropriate for the allotted space, so concepts that would more easily be discussed together get broken up over several supposedly self-contained spreads. The information that's been relegated to the tinted "Take Note" boxes is sometimes essential but more often useless. The cross-references are well-intentioned, considering the strange organization of the book, but if you're totally new to XML and reading from start to finish, jumping around is likely to confuse you. The "Find it Online" links rarely have anything to do with the "task" at hand, and would be more appropriately massed together in an appendix. And while I somewhat agree with the reviewer who says that it's helpful to include chunks of the XML spec, most often I get the sense that these bits were included just to fill space.

The content overall seems to have been written and organized without an audience in mind. Some tasks contain sentences like, "As you know, (BR) just replaces a line break within a file being output." Yet an entire, excruciatingly detailed chapter is devoted to the generic tasks of downloading and installing XML-related software. So it's assumed that you know how to write HTML but have never installed a program on your own system? Similarly, basic information that's covered thoroughly in early chapters is repeated ad nauseam in later ones, taking up valuable space and causing linear readers to experience narcolepsy.

I could go on--it's a disaster of a book, and reading it has come to feel like rubbernecking at an accident--but the near-unanimity of the comments here makes further dissection unnecessary. Instead I'd like to close with a prayer for the poor people who have to process refund requests at IDG/Hungry Minds/Wiley...

I was hoping to pick up a book that would serve as a complete "do it yourself" manual. The format is a jumble of ideas thrown together which makes the book hard to follow. I would not recommend this book to someone who is just starting out to learn XML.